Hardly working: Steve Brodner on the jobs crisis

October 8, 2010

Why are big corporations raking in big profits, even as joblessness grips the country? As part of an hour-long special on unemployment, editorial cartoonist Steve Brodner illustrates the seemingly paradoxical trends of big profits for companies and pink slips for workers.

“If you’re unemployed, regardless of what the news is now, things are just not getting any better. It’s just — it’s just sort of stuck, even though the headlines sometimes say otherwise.

So here’s our guy, and he’s got a pink slip in his hand. He and the other jobless are watching a kind of interesting split. Some large corporations are actually having a very good quarter:

AT&T: Up 25 percent.

ExxonMobil: 85 percent this quarter. Pretty good.

And how about Amazon? Maybe they read the headline that Amazon is up 45 percent.

Recently, The Washington Post asked executives of some moderate-sized companies why they weren’t hiring. They said, you know, consumer spending is down, and maybe more stimulus might help for a littlewhile, but slow growth is becoming something that people are expecting to become the way of life now.

So what the jobless are hearing is, ‘We’d love to hire you, but hey, it’s a slowdown!’ That has created a kind of psychological depression. And while people are out of work, for a lot of companies, the economy is growing — they’re doing well.

Rick Karr recently visited Seattle to look at a program designed to give the unemployed the skills they need to find jobs in one of the country’s fastest-growing industries.

Comments

Guest

I don’t understand how the State can generate revenue if all they do is laying off people from most of the State Agencies, City and County Offices. Private Corporations in Los Angeles are not creating any job opportunities or opening up New Businesses whereas the Orange County (onetime used to be a bankrupt county) now seems to have better economy than Los Angeles. Their unemployment ratio is also lower. That shows Orange County has more qualified people than Los Angeles County. Otherwise why Los Angeles County is so poor in everything from Education to Employment. High School Students’ Performance is also poor in Los Angeles County than in Orange County. Students from Orange and San Diego Counties score very high on their SAT exams and other Competitive Exams such as AP Calculus and AP Physics.
Our School District needs some review.

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